Trace your genealogy back 25 million years, and you’ll meet long-tailed monkey-like primates living in trees. Those primates were not just the ancestors of ourselves, but of all the other apes–chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons–along with the monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere, such as baboons and langurs. By comparing ourselves to these other primates, scientists can get clues to our evolution over the past 25 million years. Until now, most of those clues have come from fossils and studies on the behavior and physiology of apes and monkeys. But in the past few years scientists have begun to pore over a new record: the one that is inscribed in our genome and the genomes of other apes and monkeys.
Author: Lori Jia
At the end of February I joined John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, to talk to students at the New York University journalism program about blogging about science. There’s a post about the talk now up, including some podcast excerpts, on the the Scienceline blog from the NYU Science Health and Environmental Reporting Program. More here.
Originally published April 6, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Check this out. An international team of climate experts has been looking into the impact of climate on ecosystems, food production, and other aspects of the natural and human-controlled world. They’ve just come out with the executive summary of their contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s fourth assessment report. Heavy rains likely in some places, heat waves in others. Some parts of the world may enjoy a better climate for producing food, but for how long is unclear. Other places face serious threats to food.
I’ve just spent part of this evening pondering a commentary in the new issue of the journal Science by fellow Sciencebloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet called “Framing Science.” (The paper is behind a firewall–yeck–but Matt has expounded on similar notes here.) They argue that scientists make a mistake of just trying to dump technical complexities on the public. They should be defining hot-button issues such as stem cells or global warming so as to resonate with “core values.”
Reports are coming out this morning on a new study on one of the Loom’s favorite organisms: Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite that lives in roughly half of all people on Earth and has the ability to alter the behavior of its host. I reported on the research last June in the New York Times, when the Stanford researchers reported their results at a scientific conference. It’s nice to finally get the results on paper, though.